Ecological restoration programs increasingly aim to provide socioeconomic and environmental benefits. However, monitoring of socioeconomic outcomes of these programs lags behind monitoring of ecological outcomes. Socioeconomic methods are less established, managers have less experience, and metrics used vary, stymieing evaluation and adaptive management. Here we demonstrate that logic models and stakeholder engagement can be used to identify core socioeconomic metrics across various types of restoration, focusing on coastal restoration in the Gulf of Mexico.

Nature-based solutions (NBS) address societal challenges by managing ecosystems to provide environmental and human benefits. This report assesses 27 publicly accessible databases on NBS research and projects, highlighting their utility as well as limitations and gaps in coverage. Key recommendations include making databases downloadable, adding standardized geographic and project attributes, and improving measurement of effectiveness. Better data accessibility and consistency are essential for developing design standards and scaling up NBS implementation.

This comprehensive resource, created in collaboration with the US Department of the Interior, is a first-of-its-kind reference for implementing nature-based solutions. Nature-based solutions are actions to protect, sustainably manage or restore natural or modified ecosystems to address societal challenges—including climate change—in ways that help people and the environment. Examples cited in the Roadmap range from urban stormwater and runoff management to prescribed burns to living shorelines to restoration of various ecosystems.

The $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) in the Inflation Reduction Act—particularly the $14 billion National Clean Investment Fund and $6 billion Clean Communities Investment Accelerator—represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to leverage private capital for investments in environmental infrastructure and nature-based solutions, but the groundwork needs to be laid now. This document summarizes the relevant GGRF funds and their applicability for nature-based solutions.

Natural and working lands (NWLs) provide many benefits to people, including storing greenhouse gases (GHGs), supporting biodiversity, and generating other ecosystem services. Management of NWLs can influence their condition and function and therefore the benefits they provide. This project surveys the synthesis literature to assess how management actions on various types of NWLs affect biodiversity and GHG outcomes. This information can help to determine how to best manage these lands to contribute to both biodiversity and climate solutions in the United States.

Natural and working lands—forests, wetlands, coastal, and agricultural lands—provide many benefits, including supporting key economic sectors, enhancing community resilience to hazards such as fires and floods, and contributing to climate mitigation by storing large amounts of carbon. This guide is aimed at states interested in developing plans for conserving, managing, and restoring these lands to preserve and enhance their benefits. The guide uses examples from North Carolina’s recently completed Natural and Working Lands Action Plan to walk through the planning process, helpful resources, and the tracking of plan implementation.

As the climate changes, marshes on the Atlantic coast will migrate inland and cause even more carbon to be released into the atmosphere, a new modeling study finds. Researchers developed a spatial model for predicting habitat and carbon changes due to SLR in six mid-Atlantic U.S. states likely to face coastal habitat loss. The modeling runs looked at land changes in coastal areas through the year 2104 in scenarios that predict intermediate sea level rise. In 16 out of the 19 runs of the model, inland marsh migration converted land from a net carbon sink to a net carbon source.

Natural and working lands (NWL) in the United States provide many benefits, including food, climate mitigation, recreational opportunities, jobs, and many more. There is currently no coordinated approach in the United States to track how provision of these benefits is changing over time. This project begins to fill this gap by identifying datasets that can be used to track the status and trends of NWL benefits (i.e., ecosystem services), assessing their readiness for use in the near-term, and highlighting data gaps and limitations that need to be addressed for a national assessment.

This Phase II report of the GEMS project identifies metrics available to monitor the social and economic outcomes of a wide variety of coastal projects funded in the Gulf, using ESLMs to illustrate how these projects’ impacts cascade through the biophysical system to result in social and economic outcomes. Phase II expands the focus to assess socioeconomic metrics for 16 coastal project types, including habitat restoration, recreational enhancement, and water quality improvement projects.

A shared understanding of the benefits and tradeoffs to people from alternative land management strategies is critical to successful decision-making for managing public lands and fostering shared stewardship. This study describes an approach for identifying and monitoring the types of resource benefits and tradeoffs considered in National Forest planning in the United States under the 2012 Planning Rule and demonstrates the use of tools for conceptualizing the production of ecosystem services and benefits from alternative land management strategies.